Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building
Floor 1

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North surveys a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Historically, art from the Nordic region has been closely tied to depictions of nature. It is no surprise, then, that a diverse group of artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden question what it means to depict landscape today in a time of intensifying climate crisis. After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally and asks what images are generated in response.
 

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: 

“That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.” 

As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.

Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with additional spaces on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.